ACLUCatherine

As for the FBI, nothing right now--at least in its view. That's one of the big problems with license plate readers. There aren't enough restrictions in place, and as technology grows more sophisticated we're winding up with bigger and bigger pools of data on where all of us have been.

Hi this is Catherine Crump, I'm a lawyer at the ACLU and one of the authors of the license plate reader report.

Great question. In the Supreme Court GPS tracker case, 5 of the justices held that prolonged location tracking violates people's reasonable expectation of privacy, and is a search under the Fourth Amendment. As networks of license plate readers grow more dense, such that they track our movements in granular detail, I think the same concerns that motivated the Justices to hold as they did in the GPS case could motivate them to conclude that tracking through license plate scanners also raises Fourth Amendment issues.

Yes, that's right--but I think we are a long way away from that happening right now. Right now, the place to push back against the use of these license plate readers to build databases of all of our movements is with our local police departments and also state legislatures. In our report, my fellow AMAer Kade Crockford describes her experience working with a local community to pass sensible privacy protections for license plate readers--she scored a big win. If we have more activists on the ground doing things like this it would make a big difference. Check out p. 23 of the report http://www.aclu.org/files/assets/071613-aclu-alprreport-opt-v05.pdf

Agreed that it's a good question. We need to find ways to draw lines between that tracking which is ok (police officers following someone on the street, or perhaps tailing them for some length of time) and technologically-enhanced surveillance that is far more invasive (like the 28 days of GPS tracking that the justices found crossed the line in Jones).